As Americans fire up their barbecues for Independence Day and Britons swelter in record-breaking heat, people on both sides of the Atlantic may be reaching for their ice boxes.

In 2014, an unassuming-looking cooler shattered records on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, raking in more than $13m from backers. The Coolest Cooler, which features a blender, a USB charger and outdoor Bluetooth speaker, wildly exceeded its modest $50,000 funding goal, leaving its inventor in an unusual position – a small business with millions of dollars at its disposal, virtually overnight.

Kickstarter has given individual entrepreneurs and small companies a chance to bring their creations to light. According to the site, 38% of projects meet or exceed their goal. But for those, like the Cooler, which make millions of dollars more than planned, the extra funds and sudden exposure can pose unexpected hurdles.

“We had to rethink the scale of production and that was a big challenge,” said Ryan Grepper, inventor of the Coolest Cooler. “The sheer volume meant that we had to look at every aspect and find partners who could help us manufacture the quantity we needed and meet the continuing demand.”

This wasn’t Grepper’s first try with the Coolest Cooler. In November 2013, he launched a Kickstarter campaign for an earlier version of the product with a funding goal of $125,000. That bid failed, however, making only $100,000. If a project doesn’t meet its funding goal, the inventor gets nothing, as per Kickstarter’s policy.

Gepper decided to try again less than a year later, in July 2014. He improved the design and launched the campaign in the summer, which in hindsight seemed obvious for a quintessentially outdoor product, he said.

This time around, he reached his goal in 24 hours, and raised $1m in the first two days. By the end of the campaign, 52 days later, he had raised more than $13.2m from 62,000 backers, making it, at the time, the most successful project in Kickstarter’s five-year history.

But the immediate success of the campaign meant that Grepper had to funnel much of the additional funding back into production to satisfy his new backers.

When a project does exceed its goal, that doesn’t necessarily mean extra funds, said Kickstarter spokesperson David Gallagher.

“A project’s goal is often the minimum amount needed to get it off the ground,” he said. “If creators get more backers than they expected, they’ll probably need to make more of those rewards.”

But exceeding campaign goals can also give inventors added flexibility when it comes to designing and crafting their products. Sometimes creators use the money to enhance their product, like adding more songs to an album, or using better materials, Gallagher said.

Rather than adding new features, Grepper and his team chose to instead refine and upgrade existing elements, such as making stronger wheels and improving the hinges on the cooler.

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Other companies run multiple campaigns to ensure that backers are justly rewarded, and that the product lives up to expectations. The 3Doodler, which calls itself the “world’s first 3D printing pen” – allowing users to draw in 3D – had a goal of $30,000 when it launched on Kickstarter in February 2013. It ended up raising $2.3m (later, they ran a second project to give their initial backers the first chance to get the new version of the pen, and raised $1.5m).

“We could fulfill our vision in making the 3Doodler a reality, our way,” said Maxwell Bogue, cofounder of Wobbleworks, the Boston-based company behind the pen. “[That’s] a very rare thing.”

They were also able to make a better product, he said, by spending more money on components that would otherwise have been out of reach, as well as taking suggestions from backers about what they wanted to see added, like a plug port that allows a user to control the 3Doodler from an external device.

Bogue said his company had prepared for every scenario prior to the campaign. For example, they had found manufacturing partners who were willing to make a few thousand units, but who were also capable of scaling up into the hundreds of thousands if necessary.

“We had to expand and create a functional company in a matter of days,” he said. “Since we had done so much planning it made the process bearable.”

Sometimes this means delays in getting a product to backers. The first shipment of the Coolest Cooler had to be pushed back from February to July. The company has received more than 62,000 orders from Kickstarter backers and is on track to start shipping those this month, Grepper said, adding that it also has a waiting list of more than 200,000 orders.

“After we closed our record setting Kickstarter, we realized we’d need more time to execute at the level we felt our backers deserved,” he said. “Our backers showed they overwhelmingly shared our values and agreed with our plan to take a little more time to get it exactly right.”

Being in the spotlight put added pressure on Grepper, but it also may ultimately result in a better product.

“It certainly would be easier to develop a product like this in a less a public way, but it sure does keep you focused,” he said. “With success came high expectations, but I don’t think of the challenges that have arisen as a curse – just obstacles to overcome.”

This article was amended 5 July. A previous version said the company was on track to ship 180,000. In fact, it is on track to start shipping this month, but isn’t yet ready to fill all of the 62,000 orders from Kickstarter backers due to manufacturing constraints.